British poetry is in rude health, so why don’t more people read it?

The New Statesman's renewed commitment to poetry.

In an anthology of pieces from the New Statesman published in 1963, the editor Edward Hyams wrote that “the early work of almost every poet to make a name since 1913 appeared in the New Statesman. The literary editors, from J C Squire and Desmond MacCarthy to Karl Miller, have made a deliberate policy of seeking out young talent while never neglecting the old.”

The editors’ eye for talent was quite something in those early years. Poems were published by everyone from the war poet Siegfried Sassoon to W H Auden. Three weeks after his death in combat in 1917, the NS published Edward Thomas’s “Adlestrop”, which has become one of the most celebrated poems in English (today we publish poems by Thomas’s biographer Matthew Hollis). W B Yeats’s “Easter 1916” was first published in the NS in October 1920.

There have been excavations and discoveries, too. In 2010 we published, to immense international interest, “Last letter”, a previously unseen poem by Ted Hughes that describes the events during the three days leading up to the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. And there have been many curiosities over the years, as well – for instance, in 1959, we published Bertolt Brecht’s “The Farmer’s Concern”, followed the next year, bafflingly, by a poem called “Midstream”, written by Mao Zedong in the 1920s. It includes the lines:

O schoolmates, in youth blossoming and tall with talents,
We must now in the arrogance of our knowledge
Uproot our scented careers.
Fingering mountains only, and rivers,
To hold poetry alive in our minds,
We will use for manure
Those bygone dreams of ten-thousand-household fiefdoms.

There are fewer dictators in our pages these days, but we hope by publishing poetry weekly once again we can help showcase the best of the new. As Fiona Sampson writes in her essay, on page 46, poetry in Britain today is rich, energetic and varied. And there are many more ways to find poems – one can hear them spoken aloud at poetry slams or read them online in alternative, digital forms, as well as in magazines such as this. There is a multitude of voices out there. It is a question of tuning in and finding them.

The New Statesman is not alone in helping readers seek out those new voices. The charity First Story is part of this effort, too. In the following pages, alongside poems by John Burnside and Samuel Beckett, James Lasdun and Rachael Boast, is a poem by Azfa Ali, a student at Oxford Spires Academy. Ali took part in a workshop, supported by First Story, that met every week under the supervision of the writer Kate Clanchy. That workshop led to the publication of a collection of poems, entitled Journeys. I recommend it to anyone seeking out urgent poetic voices in the first flush of creativity.